Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to heat exchangers for cooling components of a computer system and methods of cooling computer components.
Background of the Related Art
Computer systems are being designed and built with an ever increasing number of heat generating components. Given the limited footprint of most computing systems, a continuous increase in the number of heat generating components creates challenging heat dissipation issues. These issues if not dealt with adequately can harm the structural and data integrity of the computer system, making the effect felt both at a system and component level.
Most electronic packages or nodes in a datacenter are housed in chassis that are disposed in racks. Traditionally, these nodes have been cooled by forced air cooling using air moving devices, such as fans and blowers, selectively disposed somewhere in the environment as to allow optimum air flow. These air moving devices are often designed to displace hot air away from the components by creating parallel air flow paths that circulate through the chassis and rack. For example, air moving systems may take the form of a computer room air conditioning (CRAC) system, a chassis fan system, and/or fans in an individual node or group of nodes.
Current designs of information technology equipment will preferably account for the needs of multiple market segments, such as acoustically sensitive environments, high performance clusters, or power aware enterprise solutions. In trying to meet the needs of this wide range of needs, cooling designs may be simply over-designed to work in a high performance environment while often being sub-optimized for any particular application.